


Forty Feet Down

by cher



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blood Kink, Bloodplay, Fear, Other, Painplay, Sex with Monsters, Size Kink, Tug of War Between the Powers, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-06 21:13:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18396467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cher/pseuds/cher
Summary: Nothing changes in Jon's coma dreams, except the door.





	Forty Feet Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NeverwinterThistle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverwinterThistle/gifts).



> In the water there is a doorway to the deep forty feet below the surface. The human body, compressed by the ambient pressure, by all that weight, becomes denser than water, and instead of bearing you up to the surface, the water pulls you down. - Sarah Sentilles, Draw Your Weapons

"Are you looking for your bones?"

Jon jumps. That's a voice he hasn't heard in a long while. He thought it was gone. He had mixed feelings about that idea. He doesn't turn around. "Michael."

"Yes," it creaks, sounding unchanged, its amused drawl with the madness and the rage just under the surface. "I hope you didn't think I was gone, Archivist. You know what a liar I am, even the new me. _She_ doesn't tell the truth either, you know."

"I know," he whispers to himself. Knowing, knowing, always knowing. The old scarring on his back throbs, and he tries to suppress a shiver. It's behind him, and he won't let himself turn to face it. He doesn't fear it. He should, but he knows what it will do, mostly. It's himself that he can't predict any more. 

"Here," Michael says, hovering over his shoulder. Its impossible hands cast unsettling shadows on the walls, when there is no light source to throw them. It holds out—well. Jon's ribs. Two of them, actually. He swallows.

"Where did you find these?"

The familiar mad giggle. "He let me out, you know. The Bone Turner. I watched him flailing about for so long. But he had a bit of you, and that's never good, Archivist. Careless. So I got it back for you. And then here was another one, just laying here on your desk. I do wonder why."

"Well. Thank you, Michael."

"Oh, don't thank me. I have done you such a favour and I think I'll collect on it. I think I will. It's been so boring fighting _her_  all this time."

Of course. That's Jon's life for him, isn't it—the anchor that was supposed to see him free of the Buried instead led his monster stalker back to him again. He made an anchor, all right, and with it he reeled in his doom. 

He might, perhaps, be a little glad to see Michael up and about again. Michael's dangerous, but it helps Jon more often than it tries to kill him, so all in all he'd rather it be haunting him than most of the other options. 

And then there are the other reasons that he tries very hard not to think about. His scarred skin runs with electricity because it stands so close to him, but he won't think about it. He won't. 

_

**_Then_ **

Trapped in his own mind, stitched around with other people's nightmares. He kept refusing the choice that the endlessly watching Eye asked of him, not willing to become one of the things that other people dreamed of. 

He knew this private intersection of hellscapes so well, weeks and weeks of endless terror in other people's eyes. Perhaps it was months, now. He didn't know. It would be gauche to say that he was bored, and something of a lie besides, because he did still feel compelled to watch. And the Powers did still fascinate him, every time. There was a sameness nonetheless, every tableau unchanging. Except the one. 

The only horror he didn't dare approach was the yellow door. In the repeated loop of the dreamscape, the door was the only thing that was unpredictable. It shifted. Sometimes, it presented itself with a shiny gloss finish that caught light from no available source. Once it was a glass door as if for a city office, accented in gleaming yellow brass. Sometimes, a flaking relic of aged timber, paint peeling back to show other generations of colour, golds and yellows and a disturbing rusty brown. Jon thought the door was trying to find the innocuous thing, the ordinary-seeming thing, the one that he would open with an absent mind because it seemed so familiar and safe. 

He wouldn't fall for that, not here and not now. He was honest enough with himself, with no one else to pretend to, that it might work if he was in the real world. Here, though, while there was plenty that was familiar by now, there was nothing safe. Nothing but horrors, over and over again, and a growing, unbearable sense that perhaps Jon was hurting the statement givers just a little bit more, every time he had to witness their encounters. 

It was the moment that one of them seemed to perceive him that decided him. The accusation and the pleading, as if he kept her there, as if releasing her was within his power. But of course he couldn't even release himself. Not without feeding himself to the Eye, not without becoming something even worse. 

"Right," he said. "Alright, then," addressing no one, or perhaps he spoke to the monsters in here with him. His voice was raspy with disuse, and it jarred him.  It was time to try the other option, the one that at least could be negotiated with. He stood in front of the door, and it shimmered in a heat haze and formed itself into the door to his own flat. Of course it did. Michael took obnoxious to new heights, and Jon was grateful to it, because his sudden anger was better than the hopeless lassitude he'd fallen into here. 

The door opened under his hand, the hinges creaked in that familiar way. It had a weight to it that did not match the door it pretended to be, and the insidious call to step inside was powerful. He resisted. 

"I'm not coming in. Are you in there?"

He wasn't aware of it emerging. Between one blink and the next, it was standing beside him, peering into the corridors that were mirrored, now, the pretense at Jon's own flat gone as if it had never been. Michael showed every sign of fascination. 

"I've never seen inside myself, Archivist. How interesting. I'm quite handsome really, do you think?"

Jon breathed out and shut the door. It melted away into the insubstantial gloom of his endless dreamscape, and he shuddered. He was stuck with Michael, then, the looming bulk of it with its masses of blond hair drawing fractal lines on itself. 

"And now I get to see inside you, as well. How appropriate!" It looked around, amused, with its faintly malicious air. "Do you like it here? I understand if you do, I don't mind my insides either, but it's a bit limited, don't you think?"

Jon turned to it, and it looked faded and somewhat listless, if a thing like Michael could look like anything but its master. "Are you...yourself?" 'Okay' didn't seem right but not much else did either. Helen said Michael was dead, but this one seemed alive enough. Not a static tableau like the others in here with him. 

It hissed. "I am a shell of myself, pathetic and _trapped_ and I think you should know I blame you entirely."

"Of course you do. Absolutely my fault that you tried to kill me—in revenge for something you know Gertrude did, not me, I might add— and failed. And you'd be entirely dead if you weren't trapped in here with me, so maybe you could agree to help me instead."

It broke out into one of its fits of echoing laughter. "Help! I can't help anything! I'm a memory of myself, _your_  memory, I can't even reach the rest of me. You have _archived_ me, Archivist. I hope that pleases you."

Jon turned away from it in frustration, and suddenly it was on him. Its strange skin was less strange here; at least some of Jon's influence did seem to be shaping it. Or perhaps he was shaping himself, and he no longer understood the breadth of the difference between them. 

"But," it hissed, "Now you've let me in here with you, I'm going to have you. I'm going to have you sideways and upside down and all the ways you never imagined you could be had, and you're going to let me because I'm owed."

"What do you...mean...?" he asked, pushing against it because trying to break away would just let its awful hands slice into him. 

"It has been so long... so long," it said, halfway between rage and longing, sliding its impossible body against him, and Jon swallowed his horror. Oh. Oh. Like that then. Well. He took a breath. 

"Will it help? Will it give you any power to get us out of here?"

Michael stopped moving and let go of him. "Yes," it said, a note of glee in its voice. "Yes, if you let me be inside you, if you don't let your power fight me, I can do things you can't even imagine."

"Well, I believe that," Jon said, wry, heart thumping. The idea was not repulsive, not as he'd expected to feel. It had, as Michael said, been a long time. "I'm not sure I believe the rest."

It smiled then, blinding, angles all wrong, too short, too long, too wide. "But Archivist, if I am telling you the truth you will be free. And if I'm not, I will be less vexed with you. Perhaps I'll agree not to kill you."

"Perhaps you will. Okay. Okay, then. What do you need me to do?"

"Let me in. Let me all the way in and let me mark you, and I will free us." It watched him, blurred and gleaming, perhaps even hopeful. 

Jon nodded, reached for it. It made a noise, a sound of such malicious pleasure that Jon's limbic system kicked into high gear, _there is a predator here_ and the predator was going to have him. It was, well. It was more interesting than it should be, to certain parts of his anatomy, that's all. Somehow in agreeing, he'd started to think that this was an experience he _wanted._

It was terrifying, but Jon just had to hold still and let it. Let it do whatever it needed to do. Mark him. _Fuck_ him. Somehow. God. 

Jon tried to touch its hair, and had to shut his eyes when the full-body lurch hit him. His own arm appeared to be miles long, and each shining follicle the width of his little finger. The hair was very soft, he did understand that, before the disorientation forced him to bring his hand back to wrap around his own body instead, gasping. He knew his own dimensions, at least. 

It laughed at him, of course, and pulled him against it. "You should close your eyes, Archivist. Stop trying to Know me; you can't, and trying will drive you mad." It paused, considering, and then said regretfully, "No, we'll never get out of here if you do that. Wait. Go as mad as you like once I'm free again. I'd like that, I think." 

He was pressed against it, his back to its—stomach was definitely the wrong word, oh God—front. His skin crawled and hair stood up all over his body, and he clung to his sense of himself, a human with limits and boundaries and four limbs of a regular, consistent length.  Michael was something else, but it wasn't trying to hurt him, not really. This reaction was nature and... un-nature, or whatever the powers were, interacting badly. 

He panted, and with an effort surrendered something to the horror that held him. The damp-leather unpleasant cling of its skin shifted then, something like a caress as it moved him against itself, and it was nothing like being touched by something that wore human skin. It was, suddenly, arousing. The alienness of it was electrifying. He moaned without meaning to, shocked. Where he'd expected revulsion, he lit up, his blood running hot and his dick beginning to harden in his pants. 

"Yes, Archivist. Let me, let me," it crooned, and it turned him so that it could kiss him. Its mouth came down on him like nightfall, encompassing and engulfing. It was something like being consumed and Jon felt his fear crest, and then fall away again; not consumed but chosen, seen. 

Michael's lips were wet and cool, its tongue textured, barbed one moment, catching him and filling their mouths with copper, and the next moment it was as if he was trying to swallow something cold and inert that slid down past his gullet. He choked, breathed, reached out for more. The chill in his throat thrilled him, the tsunami of it over him was intoxicating. 

It wanted to get inside him. Perhaps it thought it could climb down his throat, and maybe it could. Maybe it had forgotten how this worked, with a human. He'd rather it fuck him. He'd rather know he'd chosen some of what happened to him here, in his own dreamscape. 

He'd rather it fulfilled its desire to be inside him the usual way, before it tried its bladelike fingers and its impossible hands, the ones he knew could simply reach through flesh, curled inside him that way. 

"Michael," he rasped, his voice ruined already from its tongue. "Michael, I want you to fuck me." There. There, he'd said it, no skirting around it. 

It hissed then, past words, and pushed him down, so that he was hanging in nothingness that pressed back against him as if it were substantial. The way that lit him up was unexpected. Nothing had ever felt like this. What a stupid sentiment; of course it hadn't. But what Jon meant to articulate to himself was that something in him had been waiting for this. Something in him wanted the touch of a monster. 

It pressed up under his clothes, cut away his pants, opened him up and muttered to itself, the sibilant hiss of it worming its way into Jon's ears the way its tongue had curled down his throat. 

It cut his exposed back, his skin opened in patterns around its fingers. It felt like sparking electricity. His blood fell in spirals on the dream-floor. It was that, more than anything, that kept him him hard, his dick stiff with want, with submitting to this. Being under a monster and holding still for it to cut him, he wanted it, and had always wanted it, and the wanting of it made him reel with horror. 

So quickly overwhelmed with the madness of it, the Spiral's stock in trade, of course. Jon had trouble with up and down and sideways, understanding his own fixed point in space, and then he stopped trying to care when it pushed its blunted fingers inexorably into his ass even as the blades on its other hand whispered over his skin, the fear of it sparked up and down his spine. He flinched away from it and pushed back into it as well, shivering with the knowledge that Michael could choose to slice him open or not. 

He was aware of his own voice echoing as if in a vast space, crying out in terror and pleasure and pain. There were mirrors glinting in the edges of his vision and he didn't know if he was on his back or staring at the floor, blood drops in swirling spirals everywhere and no point of reference but Michael, which was no point of reference at all. 

It began to press into him, an enormous protrusion that he couldn't bring himself to call a cock. It was too big, far too big, and he was sure, sobbing underneath it, that taking it all would be beyond him. He existed in the swirling absences of his dreamscape, held immobile in midair by nothing, tears on his face and Michael's blades tracing his back, the skin stinging with sweat and opened wounds in fractals, his ass opened wider than could be possible, had ever been possible. 

The pressure of it was immense, the heavy push of a natural force, unstoppable. It was impossible that he should be able to fit it inside him, until he did, until his whole self opened to it, a feeling like being pressed into himself until his awareness narrowed to just this, just Michael and its presence inside him. Jon was a hall of mirrors, his insides larger than they'd lately been, and he sobbed aloud, and the echoing weirdness of Michael's voice sobbed as well, as if it were lost in the impossibility of it as well. 

They rested a moment, no movement but Jon's gasping breaths and the desperate keening that both of them were making. "Oh," Michael said, and its voice seemed to shake, "Oh, Archivist, I am inside you. How remarkable. I think, oh," and it shifted, cried out in its sobbing maddening voice, "Oh. I think I can make you fit. I was not sure, but you are just right, oh, such wonderful material."

Jon would have liked to ask questions about that, tried to gather the breath for it, but it moved again, then, began fucking him in earnest and he had no thought for anything except the immensity of it. The desperation he felt, inside himself with Michael's whole vast being in there as well. The mad pleasure at being remade under something like this, his body its clay to shape as it needed. He came, more times than he could count, or perhaps he didn't, but he was subsumed by it nevertheless, open to Michael's whims. 

Under the horrible pleasure of it all, Jon felt Michael pull at him, cut away at the eyestalks he felt sometimes inside him, the ones he had  hoped very much were metaphorical and now feared they were not. He felt Michael coax him away from that lidless gaze, slide them both toward a hall of mirrors and doors, feeling himself shift and change with the movement. He wondered, under the crashing pleasure of being fucked and hurt like this, if he should stop this, if he could stop this if he tried. 

The Eye fought Michael's claim. It pushed through the overwhelming sensations to show Jon the Spiral's victims, the statements read by previous archivists, the pain, the terror, the heartlessness of a being like Michael. 

Michael laughed, hissed, played Jon's body as if it were its own, and lit him up in what was, without a doubt, the best sex of Jon's life. "I choose you, Archivist," it crooned, its cock so wide inside him, its _self_  so wide inside him, "I choose you and no other, you'll be mine," and it knew every turn of Jon's mind, to offer him this. To offer him certainty, obsession. 

The Eye said, in Elias' voice, _Choose. Choose now, Jon, before your friends are all dead. Choose or there will be no one to save them._

It made him Know what would happen with no Archivist at the Institute, and Jon screamed, terror, pleasure, grief, release, pain, and _chose_. 

_

Jon looked for it, cautiously, when he woke up in London again. It didn't seem to be anywhere, and his new and terrible Archivist power couldn't find a whisper of it. The Spiral resists his knowing like nothing and no one else, and Jon can't deny that it's restful. 

That's the reason he spends so much time thinking about where Michael is. 

His back heals, instantly, the first of many new wounds that knit straight back together. His voice compels answers unless he tries very hard not to let it. He knows everything he wonders idly about and more besides. 

Thinking about Michael and what Michael did to him is just natural. In some ways it's the least complicated thing about his life lately. 

He thinks that Michael was probably absorbed back into the Spiral once it was released from Jon's memory. He finds that he hopes that that was what happened, that it wasn't destroyed somehow. 

And then he knows it wasn't. It comes back, Jon's bones in its terrible hands, and he trembles.

He wishes he could lie to himself. 

It turns out, though, that being the Archivist means you can't lie to yourself any more, either. He pulls his own truths out of himself just as fast as anyone else's—faster; there's no speech in the way. So he has to look it in the face, here in the real world with his dignity wrapped around him as it was not in his dreamscape: he enjoyed himself. He liked what Michael did. Like is not strong enough a word.

He says yes. 

He likes its high whining sighs as it fucks him, a nice change from the giggle. He likes that it seems—more at ease, maybe, when he'd agreed to its plan. In becoming his own sort of monster he's developed a bit of sympathy for some of the others, and if he's going to have sympathy for monsters, then the ones that Gertrude betrayed and murdered seem like they should be at the top of his list.

He likes that Michael seems more settled, although perhaps that is somewhat counter to what the Spiral should be. Jon has trouble with Michael and its patron; their very existence seems antithetical to one another. Michael is always so insistent that it isn't a Who, but Jon is very sure it was a Who and not a What that fucked him just now.

A What wouldn't have been quite so interested in taking Jon apart at the seams, figuratively and literally.

_

Jon can pull answers out of Michael, of a sort. They're not reliable answers, and they do more to amuse Michael than enlighten Jon. And he finds he's unable to __know__ anything about it. He can think anything he likes about Michael, wonder where it is, what it's thinking, what its goals are, and he won't know any more than when he started.

It's a blessed relief. It makes Jon find its company perversely, suicidally relaxing. It will tell Jon things that make his hair stand on end sometimes, but he could put his hands over his ears if he really wanted to. He could (theoretically) choose not to know. After just a few months of knowing anything he idly wonders about, the relief is overwhelming. Michael resists the idea of being known with its entire being, and Jon can't help but love it a little bit for that.

He wasn't the most well adjusted man before the Institute. He knows he's slipped considerably since.

So when it shows up, he doesn't send it away any more. (What did it ever mean, that this exceptionally dangerous manifestation sometimes did go away when he asked it to? He doesn't know. __He doesn't know__.) He listens to its mad giggle and its frankly contradictory pronouncements, and enjoys the mystery of it all. Why does it keep visiting him? No idea, he doesn't know, he doesn't need to know. It's easy to tell himself that now, easier than before he took the Archivist's mantle.

But he needs an anchor. He thinks Michael could do it. Michael is all about ingress, egress, shifting them around, creating doorways where they did not exist and taking them away. Jon's reasonably sure none of the other powers can keep the Spiral out of their business, any more than the Eye can.

_

It's Pavlovian. That particular creak of a brand new yellow door, and Jon feels himself relax, go pliant. It's somewhere between the impulse to go limp in the jaws of a predator, and the limpness of satiation he's anticipating. Michael's going to make him beg for it.

It touches him in his sleep, sometimes. Shows up and slices his clothes away from him, draws spiral patterns all over him in ink or blood or teasing touches that are maddening for all the ways they aren't sharp. The breath goes out of him, feeling himself open to Michael, his whole self a door. Michael's whole vast being a key.

It should repel him, the endless unknowable lies that are Michael. But it doesn't, it doesn't.

This time you should let me touch you, Jon says, and he works hard to get his voice to come out firm and strong and knows it hasn't. He knows he sounds uncertain and humiliatingly eager. Michael smiles, or doesn't, but Jon feels its amusement regardless of what the blurred angles of its face manage to convey.

Oh, Archivist, it says, and it's delighted, mocking. Would you like to try?

And he does try, the skin like cardboard left out in the rain, sharp in places and clinging damply in others, and the very lack of horror it sparks in him makes him half-sick at himself, so Michael will be happy about that at least. It adores Jon's existential crises. He tries to map out Michael's limbs, its torso, all those places that touch him and fuck him, the body he's pressed close against for months and months now, and it's still all alien. He can't match what he sees with what he knows, with what he feels. Michael is a jigsaw hanging together because it was forced to rather than because it fits. Michael is a contradiction, and Jon wants to know it.

He'll never know it, and there will always be something new to try to bend his mind around. He'll have the impossible in his bed forever and it's everything he never knew he needed. 

His skin knits no matter what Michael does to him, now. It's like they were made for one another. 


End file.
